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Poetry expresses a particular relationship with time and with cognition, observed Iosif Brodskij in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1987. When a poet writes, and is surprised by what emerges, never knowing in advance what will come out of it, well, at that moment «the future of language invades its present. There are, as we know, three modes of cognition: analytical, intuitive, and the mode that was known to the Biblical prophets, revelation. What distinguishes poetry from other forms of literature is that it uses all three of them at once (gravitating primarily toward the second and the third)» . Brodskij's observation defines a feature of the creative dimension, yet not that dimension alone: the possibility of meeting what has not yet been thought, and of allowing oneself to be passed through, «possessed», by the object's unforeseen qualities, in overly general terms has to do with the symbolizing workings of the psyche towards what it cannot accept at a given time, the generation of repression, the dimension of infiltration of what has been repressed and the effort to integrate it. In this formulation I would highlight, however, mainly the issue of the prophetic, guarantor of the advent of the new, and the fact that the poetic determines a transformation of time.
The idea of a «future which invades the present» and which defines poetic space in such a way is not totally new to us. Valery (1948) in speaking about his writings,1 had already referred to «leftovers of the future», furtive beings opening up unforeseen paths. It should not surprise us greatly to learn that the new, that things which have never previously occurred, make their way into present time in the guise of residues, leftovers and fragments, given the anti-syntactic or deconstructive nature of the poetic and its characteristic of placing in tension the identity of meaning and of the speaking subject (Kristeva, 1980).
In this vision the future can only reach where the ego makes itself absent and